Taking a rare expedition to distant Mongolia, traveling Chabad photographer Meir Alfasi met with the country’s last known Jew, who printed the country’s first Tanya. The journey concluded with a visit to the Kazakh nomads, who preserve an ancient tradition of hunting with golden eagles.
By Anash.org reporter
In a rare expedition to distant Mongolia, Meir Alfasi, Yossi Rainitz, and Yaki Hershkop embarked on a geographic journey that included two particularly moving stops: a meeting with the last Jew in Mongolia and a visit to the eagle-hunting tribe in the western part of the country.
In Ulaanbaatar, they met Yair Porat, the only Jew currently living in the Mongolian capital. He welcomed them warmly and shared about his efforts with Jewish travelers visiting Mongolia, supplying them with wine for Shabbos and setting up a shul for them to daven and spend Shabbos.
Especially moving was his unique initiative, the first of its kind in the country’s history, printing a Tanya in Mongolia, with the help of the closest shliach, Rabbi Aharon Wagner, in Irkutsk, southern Siberia.
Yair also shared a painful memory: testimonies about Jews who once lived in Mongolia and were slaughtered, their deaths unrecorded. Recently, he discovered a mass grave marked with a magen david, a silent testimony to the Jews who were murdered there.
From the settled north, they headed west to the Altai Mountains, where they encountered the , Kazakh nomads who preserve an ancient tradition of hunting with golden eagles. In their tents, against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks and deserts, they were exposed to a rare culture, filled with pride, resilience, and respect for nature and animal life.
The encounter with these hunters, who rarely receive visitors from the outside, was a fascinating anthropological experience. They demonstrated their hunting method, spoke of their bond with the eagle, who is treated almost like family, and proudly recounted a tradition passed down for hundreds of years, from generation to generation.
Photo: Meir Alfasi
The local people remind me of the book Go My Son, where he was sent to eastern USSR during the war.